Top 100 Not Self Quotes
#1. I don't say I'm not magnetic to try and sound self-deprecating. I'm just not. Though I actually love people. I would like to meet more people. I know no one.
Kristen Stewart
#2. There are two lives to each of us, the life of our actions, and the life of our minds and hearts. History reveals men's deeds and their outward characters, but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life, unpenetrated and unguessed.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#3. Most of us do not like to look inside ourselves for the same reason we don't like to open a letter that has bad news.
Fulton J. Sheen
#4. And there I suddenly found my articulate self in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things. And that's when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor?
Cary Grant
#5. The Self in you is the same as the Self Universal. Whatever powers are manifested throughout the world, those powers exist in germ, in latency, in you ... If you realize the unity of the Self amid the diversities of the Not-Self, then Yoga Will not seem an impossible thing to you.
Annie Besant
#6. Criticism is valuable ... and self-congratulatory experiences are not.
Harold Prince
#7. Do not tell me what to do, tell me what you do. Do not tell me what is good for me, tell me what is good for you. If, at the same time, you reveal the you in me, if you become a mirror to my inner self, then you have made a reader and a friend.
George A. Sheehan
#8. This is not the case. There is nothing that is not the Self. The Self does not have to be realized.
Frederick Lenz
#9. Imponderable Sir, I presume from some if not all of your many reputations that you might prefer honest and convinced unbelief to the hypocritical and self-interested affectation of faith or the smoking tributes of bloody altars.
Christopher Hitchens
#10. To no one, he knew, not even to Willem. But he'd had years to learn how to keep his thoughts to himself; unlike his friends, he had learned not to share evidence of his oddities as a way to distinguish himself from others, although he was happy and proud that they shared theirs with him
Hanya Yanagihara
#11. I brought you here to tell you this: sometimes what we are searching for does not exist. We may sacrifice for it, even bleed for it, but it was never meant to be ours.
Esther Dalseno
#12. You do not need permission to be you. Just be your authentic, brilliant, one-soul-only self. You are a marvel. Act like it!
Toni Sorenson
#13. This was misery that could not yield, for he sorrowed for a time he could not return to, and a self he would never again be.
Robin Hobb
#14. In order not to cut out a large part of one's private life, the creative work should not swallow up every other form of self-expression. But that is the most complicated thing.
Elena Ferrante
#15. Failures are not your own self. See to it that you are free from them. Only when you can relinquish them can you really be free and no longer assailed by them.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#17. If there is one lesson I've learned from failure and success, it's this. I am not the outcome. I am never the result. I am only the effort.
Kamal Ravikant
#18. What she liked the most about drinking was not being present, that feeling of self-evasion, of disconnection, of liberation, of escape. Alcohol offered her an excellent alternative to being herself without actually dying.
Laura Esquivel
#19. Flowers speak to us if we listen. Appreciating the blossom in hand or pausing in the garden to admire the beauty quiets our outer selves till we hear something new, something we did not hear before - the still, small voice of Nature herself.
Jean Hersey
#20. Shields Green was not one to shrink from hardships or dangers. He was a man of few words, and his speech was singularly broken; but his courage and self-respect made him quite a dignified character.
Frederick Douglass
#21. Again, it is self-evident that truth exists. For truth exists if anything at all is true, and if anyone denies that truth exists, he concedes that it is true that it does not exist, since if truth does not exist it is then true that it does not exist.
Thomas Aquinas
#22. When we truly discover how to love our neighbor as our self, Capitalism will not be possible and Marxism will not be necessary.
Shane Claiborne
#23. Your identity should not be fully defined by what you do, by being a manager, a wife, a mother of children or a computer programmer
Sunday Adelaja
#24. Generally speaking, writers who have been at it for a while, and who are any good at it, suffer from an acute kind of self-knowledge. The unexamined life is not a risk for them.
Mark Slouka
#25. Gymnastics, for me, gave me a lot of self-pride: that drive to want to be great at something for myself. But it also gave me a sense of appreciation toward God. Now that I'm getting older, I really appreciate the talents God gave me. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.
Amanda Borden
#26. There are interviewers who try to trip up the candidate," says Hanold. "If you make people do intellectual gymnastics, you're not getting their true self. There is no right answer to any question I ask. I want an authentic response." To
Ethan F. Becker
#27. Argentina wouldn't exist if not for self-determination, and this can't be valid for some but not for others.
Pepe Eliaschev
#28. There is something more here than embarrassment at being praised. The strengths 'I' have are not admissible to the arena of ability where they are socially useful; for once admitted, 'I'
my real self
would no longer have them.
Richard Sennett
#29. Vanity is so constantly solicitous of self, that even where its own claims are not interested, it indirectly seeks the aliment which it loves, by showing how little is deserved by others.
William Gilmore Simms
#30. But at three, four, five, and even six years the childish nature will require sports; now is the time to get rid of self-will in him, punishing him, but not so as to disgrace him.
Plato
#31. It's not hard to create self-beliefs that produce a successful and happy life. The main job is to unlearn your limiting beliefs.
Maddy Malhotra
#32. A radical shift in attitude happens in small steps. It's a transformation. A butterfly does a lot of walking and eating and growing before it finally forms a chrysalis and emerges with wings. It's not an instant transformation.
Rohvannyn Shaw
#34. The strike and the boycott, they have cost us much. What they have not paid us in wages, better working conditions, and new contracts, they have paid us in self-respect and human dignity.
Cesar Chavez
#35. You do not need to pay attention to those voices within you that create pain, or make you feel less competent, smart or able.
Sanaya Roman
#36. It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle.
Tom DeLay
#37. Relax; the world's not watching that closely. It's too busy contemplating itself in the mirror.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#38. Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.
Virginia Woolf
#39. Did I express my personality? I think that's quite unimportant because it's not people's selves but what they have to say about life that's important.
Paul Strand
#40. Is self-interest a bad thing? We want our leaders to be pure and good, but at the same time we want them to be effective, and to be effective you often have to be ruthless and not bound by ideology or the same morals that we pretend to hold ourselves to.
Beau Willimon
#41. Neither the good nor the true is self-realizing, so it is not generally a sufficient explanation of why people believe that X that X is true, or of why people do Y that Y is good.
Raymond Geuss
#42. We obscure our self-knowledge with anxiety; that it is not what we desire but what we fear and dread we may desire that impedes us - a
John Cheever
#43. Intuition is not clairvoyance. It's not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary, that 90 percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously - but no less rigorously - than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person.
Peter Watts
#45. Say to them, say to the down-keepers, the sun-slappers, the self-soilers, the harmony-hushers, "Even if you are not ready for day it cannot always be night." You will be right. For that is the hard home-run. Live not for battles won. Live not for the-end-of-the-song. Live in the along.
Gwendolyn Brooks
#46. Those who are actively seeking enlightenment will not find it because the act of looking for it is the distraction from it.
Enza Vita
#47. I'm still not totally sure I know what's true about me.
Kenneth Logan
#48. To be a success you need to have persistence of drive, persistence of vision, and persistence of action. You will be doing yourself a disservice by not staying resilient.
Meghan Wier
#49. Not so long ago I'd been convinced that losing my voice was the worst thing that could ever happen to me, the worst tragedy. But since then I'd been losing my whole self, everything I stood for, believed in, felt. Everything I ever wanted to be. Everything I ever was.
Sarah Ockler
#50. Anger, as long as it is controlled anger, is no obstacle to efficiency. Self-control is one thing the sociopath does not usually possess. Use yours to his undoing.
Jeff Cooper
#51. Always have faith in yourself and the universe, for one will not get you anywhere without the other. Both must be equally strong to reach your desires, for they are the wings that will lift you to your dreams.
Suzy Kassem
#52. Robinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man, could not have lived in New York city.
Walter Lippmann
#53. I suspect anyone self-satisfied enough to refuse lawful pleasures: we are not sufficiently rich in our separate resources to reject the graces of the universe when offered ...
Freya Stark
#54. Problem does not lie in being a husband; the problem is with acting as a husband (being bossy).
Dada Bhagwan
#55. Happiness is attained, not through self-interest, but through unconditional fidelity in endless love of eternal light.
Aaron Cohen
#56. But you can live in the most democratic country on earth, and if you're lazy, obtuse or servile within yourself, you're not free.
Ignazio Silone
#57. Self-discipline predicted academic performance more robustly than did IQ. Self-discipline also predicted which students would improve their grades over the course of the school year, whereas IQ did not. ... Self-discipline has a bigger effect on academic performance than does intellectual talent.5.2
Charles Duhigg
#58. Not one But twenty-four self-giving-hours Every day I have For my use.
Sri Chinmoy
#59. In a speech, the columnist Charles Krauthammer ... offered a new version of Socrates' famous saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living." In our age of bottomless self-love and obsession with our own feelings, Krauthammer suggested, "The too-examined life is not worth living either.
John Leo
#60. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me."
As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.
Maggie Nelson
#61. Greatness demands that I understand that I am not nearly as big as I thought myself to be, but that I am capable of becoming far bigger than I ever imagined myself to be.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#62. Independence has nothing to do with whether or not someone chooses to be single or to be married, to have children or to not have children. Independence by definition is about self-governing. About choosing for yourself. About making your own decisions. All
Krista Ritchie
#63. You do not need any more strength. You only need to realize how strong you already are.
Vironika Tugaleva
#64. Love is not about others; love is a practice of self-mastery.
Bryant McGill
#65. Although a man may wear fine clothing, if he lives peacefully; and is good, self-possessed, has faith and is pure; and if he does not hurt any living being, he is a holy man.
Denis Diderot
#66. It's important to avoid mirrors if one is unprepared to accept their daily news, and I think, in something as insignificantly devastating as appearance, denial is more socially constructive than despondency. Not that there's anything especially wrong with me
just the usual.
Rivka Galchen
#67. True healing is not physical - it is a spiritual awakening to our True Self. If art is used for that purpose then it can be quite healing as it purifies the mind of thoughts that create disease.
Judith Cornell
#68. 92. Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping - its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.
Maggie Nelson
#70. When you were the son of evil, there was little you couldn't do, own, or kill, and yet her mortal self was an elusive trophy he could touch, but not put on his shelf.
This made her rare. This made her precious.
This made him ... love her.
J.R. Ward
#71. The ability to reflect is associated with critical thinking and reasoning ability. And the capacity to be alone is one of the highest levels of development. It's important to know how to self-soothe and be confident of other people's love even when they're not there in front of you.
Laurie Helgoe
#72. Do not look for happiness outside yourself. The awakened seek happiness inside.
Peter Deunov
#73. The sense of being a separate, egoic self begins with the astral, not with the physical, body. The soul is individualized spirit.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#74. I have found a way to beat myself
I win by losing, something like that
I'm told that I'm stupid
So ok, I'll be stupid
If I can't register the pain
Then it's not there
I'm not so stupid after all
I'll show them
Henry Rollins
#76. In the traditional urban novel, there is only survival or not. The suburban idea, the conformist idea, that agony can be seen to and cured by doctors or psychoanalysis or self-knowledge is nowhere to be found in the city. Talking is a way of life, but it is not a cure. Same with religion.
Jane Smiley
#77. Our thinking will automatically improve when we remember the words of Paul: 'know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and the spirit of God dwelleth in you?
Thomas S. Monson
#78. Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
Charlotte Bronte
#79. I remember his eyes. They are just like mine. Every time I look in the mirror I see him. I try not to look at my self too much.
Ida Lokas
#80. Work is not a curse of God but one of the benefits of living on this earth. Finding the work you love is not a self-serving goal; it is a required component of fulfilling your true calling.
Dan Miller
#81. Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies
Henry Kissinger
#82. Neuroscientists have discovered that when you ask the brain to meditate, it gets better not just at meditating, but at a wide range of self-control skills, including attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, and self-awareness.
Kelly McGonigal
#83. If 'one' really were the sufferer or the enjoyer, then he would get tired. But the Self in reality is not experiencing anything. He simply does egoism only.
Dada Bhagwan
#84. I am not someone who throws around the word 'self-esteem.' It is a fictional description.
Nicolle Wallace
#85. I will come to you, my friend, when I no longer need you. Then you will find a palace, not an almshouse.
Henry David Thoreau
#86. The greatest victory comes not from winning against enemies but from winning over one's self.
Debasish Mridha
#87. The Chinese mom is not the helicopter mom. I would never do their homework for them. It's all about: Take responsibility, don't blame others. Be self-reliant. Never blame the teacher.
Amy Chua
#88. The butterfly does not look back upon its caterpillar self, either fondly or wistfully; it simply flies on.
Guillermo Del Toro
#89. When people believe a tale that conflicts with self-checkable evidence it tells me that people undervalue the role of evidence on formulating an internal belief system. Why this is so is not clear, but it enables many people to hold fast to ideas and notions based purely on supposition.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#90. We are not saved by denying self, or taking up our cross, or doing anything else, we are saved by simply believing in Jesus.
R.A. Torrey
#91. Amount of freedom you have in your life is not the measure of the worth of your life. Just as safety is an empty and even self-defeating goal to live for, so ultimately is autonomy.
Atul Gawande
#92. Once a vegan, we are always so, because our motivation is not personal and self-oriented, but is based on concern for others and on our undeniable interconnectedness with other living beings.
Will Tuttle
#93. Keep on doing whatever it is that you have been doing; but, do no attachment-abhorrence. If 'You' stay in 'Your [Pure Soul] state'; attachment-abhorrence will not occur.
Dada Bhagwan
#94. As individuals, I just think that our biggest responsibility is to be self-aware, and some of us are not.
Pharrell Williams
#95. I do not take advice or listen to the words of hypocrites or beings that are not self-realized. It's nothing personal. I am simply no fan of beings that try to sound wise, while trying to mask their imbecility.
Lionel Suggs
#96. Barometer of success in later life is not that they always win, but how they deal with failure. An ability to pick themselves up when they fall, retaining their optimism and sense of self, is a far greater predictor of future success than class position in Year 3.
Helen Fielding
#97. If you walk down the street and see someone in a box, you have a choice. That person is either the other and you're fearful of them, or that person is an extension of your family. And that makes you at home in that world and not fearful. So really it's very self-serving.
Susan Sarandon
#98. In them was not the savage blankness of the reptile species. Instead there was something far worse - burning, unquenchable rage mixed with the self-mocking irony of great intelligence.
Whitley Strieber
#99. Everyone should be encouraged to start his own business, not just some rare breed that self-identifies as entrepreneurs.
Jason Fried
#100. And as long as a self is driven by an id to a Thou, it is not a matter of love, either. In love the self is not driven by the id, but rather
Viktor E. Frankl
